A Cornell University senior stripped to her bra and underwear during her thesis presentation — and got two dozen others to join in — to protest her professor’s contention the week before that her clothing was inappropriate.

It came days after her professor, Rebekah Maggor, questioned whether the denim cutoff shorts Chai was wearing during a test run of the presentation were too short.

“The first thing that the professor said to me was ‘is that really what you would wear?” Chai wrote in a Facebook post about the incident. “The professor proceeded to tell me, in front of my whole class, that I was inviting the male gaze away from the content of my presentation and onto my body,” she wrote.

As for Professor Maggor, other students in the class have come to her defense. 11 of her 13 classmates issued a statement explaining that the professor was just urging the importance of professionalism in speaking situations.

“[Maggor] is a gift to Cornell,” the statement read, stating that the students felt Chai’s post did not “adequately represent [Maggor’s] past and continued advocacy for women and minorities” and that Maggor had “apologized on more than one occasion.”

If feminists want to be taken seriously, they should act seriously. Stripping in class is not the way to promote women’s equality or even to promote respect between the genders.